The Rod Martin Report - September 9, 2017

The Rod Martin Report – November 12, 2016

The Rod Martin Report

An Enormous Sigh of ReliefDemocrats Reject the Working ClassRealignment and a New Republican MetanarrativeYes It Was Rigged: Here’s HowRiots, Snowflakes and the General Leftwing MeltdownPersonnel is PolicyIt Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

Dear Friends,

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States, along with Senate and House majorities, and absolute blowout numbers at the state level all across America.

Many of us have been more than a bit uneasy with Donald Trump. But as it began to dawn that all of us, our nation, our businesses, our churches, our families, had avoided the abyss, it was hard not to let out a deep sigh of relief. Trump at his worst will not be our enemy. There is still time for America.

What’s more, a six to seven seat Supreme Court majority composed of virtually any of the names on Trump’s lists might well do more to turn back the clock on the left’s annihilation of Constitutional boundaries than all the Republicans we’ll ever elect in our lifetimes.

We’ve survived an existential threat. We may well spend the next four years in partial frustration: we have before. But we won’t spend it in chains. And we might well see the dawn of a better – a greater – America none of us have dared imagine.

*******

Just before press time, my buddy Jack Wheeler sent me this note. Jack is considered the architect of the Reagan Doctrine, among many other things.

On Wednesday November 9 at about 10am Nepal time (11:15pm Tuesday east coast time), I was on the shore of Lake Tilicho in the Himalayas, the highest lake in the world at 16,257 feet, when the satphone rang.
A friend called to tell us that Trump had won Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida. My heart leaped. A few minutes later, our friend called back to say he’d won Iowa. My knees almost buckled and I started to cry. I had hoped against hope this was possible and now it really was – Trump could actually win.
Our helicopters took us to the Hidden Kingdom of Lo near the border of Chinese Tibet. We got word that the electoral count was 244 to 203, that Pennsylvania was up for grabs. We drove to the remote Chhosar Sky Caves, where people lived in caves carved out of vertical cliffs 3,000 years ago.
The satphone rang again. I was some distance away. After the call, several in our group walked over to me to shake my hand and inform me the electoral count was 274. “Jack,” they said, “America has given you a wonderful birthday present – Donald Trump is the next President of the United States.”
Yes, November 9th is my birthday and I couldn’t have asked for a better present. America is saved, I thought. November 9th is World Freedom Day, as it’s the day in 1989 that the Berlin Wall fell. Now it’s also the day the Clinton Corruption Machine fell along with the entire Democrat-Enemedia Complex and the Global Elite.
Now we have a chance to make America America again. Providence is smiling upon our country once more.

To which I can only say, amen.

*******

While the final popular vote count is still not in (and there’s some question as to whether Trump or Clinton will win it), the Electoral College was perfectly clear in the wee hours of election night:

Yes, Donald Trump did exactly what he said he’d do from the beginning: he won legions of Rust Belt working class Democrats.

It’s hard to imagine any of our other Republican candidates managing that. Republicans last won Wisconsin in 1984. We last won Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988. That’s 28 years, more than a generation.

But the bigger point is, Donald Trump just made Republicans the party of the working class. And Democrats are doing everything in their power to cement that.

It took no time whatsoever for the media to spin this. One popular line was that the voters Trump took from Clinton are old and will die soon, another was they were all ignorant, uneducated racists.

To this one must ask: were they all ignorant, uneducated, irredeemable deplorables in the last six or seven elections too? And does screaming at them in this fashion help or hurt Democrats’ chances in 2018 and 2020?

You tell me. But I know this. All our lives we’ve been told that Democrats were the party of the working class, the very same people they are now demonizing as idiots, haters and fools.

There’s an enormous opportunity in that which no one on Earth is better suited to seize than Donald J. Trump.

The extent of Trump’s victory – and the downballot races that went with it – is so great that NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg actually said the Republican Party hasn’t been so strong since the 1920s.

Even more amusing: the Columbus Dispatch reported on Wednesday that John Kasich had planned a major D.C. speech for the day after the election, to “recraft the Republican Party.” He “abruptly canceled” his speech Wednesday morning.

Bwuhahahahahahahaha!

*******

And yes, Trump was right: the polls were rigged. I described this in some detail last week and I won’t repeat that here. However, when almost every single poll is wrong, and when almost every single poll oversamples one side by roughly the same amount, and when they did it in Britain – twice, first against Cameron and then against Brexit – and in Israel against Netanyahu, and in Kentucky against Bevin…

Not to pat myself on the back too much, but as you probably realize, even though I personally supported only Southern Baptist candidates in the primary, my batting average as a prognosticator has been virtually 1.000 throughout the entire cycle.

But another part has been my appreciation of just what “Make America Great Again” really meant. It’s not a mere slogan: potentially, at least, it’s an entire new metanarrative for the conservative movement, something Republicans have utterly lacked since the end of the Cold War.

I wrote at some length on the need for this, all the way back in 2010. I also formulated it much as Trump later did, although my “Keep America Number One” is nowhere near as good as his phrasing. I encourage you to read it. There is vastly more to this, and vastly more potential, than just the words themselves. They could change everything for us.

“Donald Trump said he had a movement and he did. This is how you know. His presidential campaign was bad–disorganized, unprofessional, chaotic, ad hoc. There was no state-of-the-art get-out-the-vote effort–his voters got themselves out. There was no high-class, high-tech identifying of supporters–they identified themselves. They weren’t swayed by the barrage of brilliantly produced ads–those ads hardly materialized. This was not a triumph of modern campaign modes and ways. The people did this. As individuals within a movement.”

Yes, despite everyone on both left and right assuring us it wasn’t true, the Trump movement was indeed Brexit redux, complete with a silent, angry majority that was utterly fed-up with being called racist homophobic morons simply for living their lives, while their “enlightened” leadership focused on every niche leftist cause except their jobs and their futures. People who – once again – have been the working class backbone of the Democrat Party for a century.

Again, do you think an unending barrage of insults will help the Democrats recapture these people?

And what do you think might happen if Trump actually gets organized over the next four years?

Republicans already held 31 governors’ offices. Even after narrowly losing Pat McCrory in North Carolina (but not a veto-proof majority in his state legislature), Republicans now have 33, including a pickup in Bernie Sanders’s Vermont. 34 is the GOP’s all-time high. They also now have 29 state attorneys general, an all-time high, which is remarkable considering George Soros’ and Tom Steyer’s longtime effort to dominate these seats.

Republicans won the Kentucky House for the first time in nearly a century and reclaimed the Iowa Senate from Democrats, giving the GOP control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s offices in those states. Republicans now control 66 of the nation’s state legislative chambers, to Democrats’ 30.

It hasn’t been helping them in Congress either. Republicans retained overwhelming control of the House: with 3 seats still undecided, the balance stands at 239-193. The Dems picked up just 6 seats out of 435 in a year they believed they might win control. And in the Senate, the Pubs easily kept their majority, losing just 2 seats for a 52-48 balance in a year nearly everyone believed the Dems would take control.

Now didn’t the NeverTrumpers promise us that Trump would kill the downballot? Oops.

*******

What’s remarkable about this is that 2016 was the first re-elect for the Senate Class of 2010. Pubs had to defend a lot more seats than Dems. It would have been perfectly reasonable to lose the Senate no matter who was running at the top of the ticket.

Ah, but 2018 is a whole other matter.

Next time, Democrats are defending not one, not two, but NINE Senate seats in states Trump won:

Back to rigging. Limbaugh says the pollsters didn’t actually miss anything, that the polling data has been weaponized. And that’s pretty clearly true (though it’s also true that its gotten extremely difficult – or extremely expensive, depending – to get an accurate poll by traditional methods. That’s just no excuse for all of them being wrong in exactly the same way).

But it’s not just polls. It’s that much more pernicious, newer phenomenon: betting sites.

This became extremely obvious with Brexit. The betting sites claimed that Leave had a 16% chance of victory even after the polls closed.

How could that be?

I watched Brexit returns at John Mauldin‘s house along with Neil Howe. If you know anything about these guys at all, you know they’re wicked smart. As the returns increasingly piled up a strong lead for the Leave campaign, Neil opined in some detail that such thin “markets” could be – and must have been – manipulated by a few very large bets that skewed the result; and of course, that this was almost certainly intentional.

Well guess what: my very smart friend was spot-on.

Ladbrokes’ head of political betting, Matthew Shaddick admitted as much on CNBC. And he explained why: improved odds for Remain were driving financial markets higher. Translation: a lot of people were making a heck of a lot more money on the market moves than they were having to bet to cause that.

It gets worse. It turns out that only a few large bettors were dramatically skewing the odds in favor of Remain. The vast majority of bets were placed on Leave: they just weren’t big enough bets to overcome the people skewing the odds.

*******

So back to America.

The betting sites were all giving something like a 10,000% chance of a Clinton victory, exactly as you’d expect.

But what if you could make odds without bothering to have a market?

That’s what Nate Silver did all year. In 2015 he gave Trump a roughly 0% chance of making it past August. He didn’t even bother to consider the polling. He continued in that vein until Trump won the nomination. He let up a bit around Convention time, and then shot Clinton’s odds back to around 90%. At the end, he gave Trump a 1-in-3 chance, to the great outrage of liberal punditry (and NeverTrumpers, of course).

So how did Silver come up with his odds? How did the Puffington Host come up with a 2% chance of Trump’s election?

Who knows? Who cares? It was all bunk: not only in the sense that it was wrong, but in the sense that it was completely pulled out of thin air. Silver at least pretends to have a “scientific methodology”. But come on.

The real point is this. If Trump and Clinton were only a few points apart – which is not only actually true, but is almost always true – then any number of things could swing the election toward the end. That’s just how it works. And a two-point race, or a five-point race, is close, and everyone knows it’s close.

But when betting sites and other “experts” say it’s not a two-point race, or a five-point race, but rather a “70% chance” or whatever, that’s equivalent to saying it’s a done-deal. And that has a dramatic impact on how everyone acts thereafter.

Which is why the alleged odds makers have proliferated in politics this last year as we’ve never before seen. Someone at the DNC figured out how psychologically useful that difference is. And also, how easy it is to make these “odds” up with absolute impunity.

It’s a scam as big as snake oil and Florida swampland.

*******

As to actual ballot fraud, it might not be insignificant that both Ohio and Wisconsin had new laws requiring a photo ID. Crazy what happens when there’s even a little bit of ballot security.

*******

This doesn’t exactly count as rigging, but it’s close.

Newsbusters has a piece called “Scandal: Hollywood Spends Decades Scripting Hillary’s Presidency“. It goes through the dozens of TV series, movies and even children’s books that have been programming you for President Hillary for a quarter century. There’s stuff there even I’d forgotten. But you’ll remember when you see it.

Indeed, the media’s over-the-top bias and condescension got a lot of attention this week, and not just from Fox News. CBS actually ran a piece entitled “The Unbearable Smugness of the Press“.

Instead, she hid behind a man – as she is wont to do – sending John “Spirit Cooking” Podesta out to tell everyone to go home, as the campaign hadn’t decided whether they’d won or lost as yet and would know more the next day. Why that should have affected any decent person’s desire to thank the weeping crowd for their sacrifices one can only wonder.

The much-vaunted Republican civil war, “that’s coming no matter who wins“? That isn’t going to happen (although there will likely be a bit of a purge). But the Democrats? They’re about to eat each other.

They aren’t the only reason. But if you think this high-level Brown-Shirtery isn’t driving it, I have some more of that swampland to sell you.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, a liberal atheist, described this in alarming detail when he endorsed Donald Trump in a column called “The Bully Party“. You very much need to read it.

This is the America we’d be living under had Hillary won. It’s the America Donald Trump now has to sort out.

One of the snowflakes on my Facebook wall argued that “both sides riot”, which aside from being ludicrous also evokes images of a bunch of Alex P. Keatons setting fire to a pile of Izod shirts.

Still, as a public service I thought I’d show you a photo of the Great Republican Riots of 2008 and 2012, when conservatives rampaged against Barack Obama:

Terrible, huh? And more to the point, so very “morally equivalent”.

*******

As I keep telling you, personnel is policy. What Trump – or any politician – says is a lot less important than who he hires.

The early reports are great. You already know my thoughts on the brilliant conservative dynamo Kellyanne Conway. But this week, Trump named a who’s who of Reagan conservatives that reads like the leadership of the “ultra-right” Council for National Policy, a group of which I have been a member for many years.

Chris Christie is out as head of the transition team; Mike Pence is in. Jeff Sessions’ people are everywhere. My buddy Ken Blackwell is heading the domestic transition. The Heritage Foundation is staffing everything in sight.

Lindsey Graham suddenly thinks “there is no stronger Constitutional conservative than Ted Cruz”, which is true, and wants Trump to name Cruz to the Supreme Court, which is probably Lindsey hoping to get Ted out of the Senate.

There are no cabinet picks yet, but early talk centers on Sessions, Newt, Ben Carson, Larry Kudlow, Steve Forbes, and Rick Perry.

It’s a dream team, if true.

*******

Actual policies haven’t gotten lost either. You can look for yourself at GreatAgain.gov, which Trump wasted no time launching. Top priorities so far: building the wall, rebuilding the military, dismantling Dodd-Frank, tax cuts and tax reform, renegotiating NAFTA (which both Mexico and Canada say they’re on board to do), and yes, repealing Obamacare.

The devil will be in the details. But imagine what the foregoing paragraph would have read like in a Hillary Administration.

This is a great day.

*******

It’s time to wrap this up. But in quitting now, we quit after the victory, not before. And that’s precisely what virtually everyone told us not to do. We spent an entire election being told to quit, being told it was over, being told there was no point in going forward at all. This was the principle rationale for NeverTrump, in fact: that Donald Trump must necessarily lose in such a blowout that he would take down the entire Republican Party with him.

It was in this way also like Brexit. Leave was certain to lose, they said. The betting sites gave it a 16% chance even after the polls closed. It won.

And Trump won. And we won. Overwhelmingly and historically.

It ain’t over till it’s over. No matter how many Erick Ericksons and Steve Deaces, no matter how many Bill Kristols and John Kasichs, no matter how many ABC and CBS polls tell us to stop.

The ideas which are America are greater than them. They’re great enough to animate the world. And we are their custodians. They are in our care. It wouldn’t have mattered if the outcome had been 99-1 against us. We owed it to everyone to fight on.

That is perhaps Donald Trump’s greatest virtue. He fights, when all those around him tell him not to fight, when the whole Republican Party would rather cry in its beer and hand the country to its enemies than seem “mean” or “offensive” or fight.

Churchill said never quit, never never never quit. And we did not quit. And we won.

Yesterday was Veterans Day. It is the day we honor the sacrifice unto death of our heroes lo these two and a half centuries, and the willingness of millions more to give their lives as well.

Can we not, in a civic realm which, even now with leftist rioters, carries virtually no comparable risk, do the same?

We can. We must.

Now, seeing just how great the potential truly is before us, perhaps far more of us will.

God bless America. Let us thank Him for His great deliverance.

And now, let’s go forward and earn it.

*******

You can read about the world anywhere. You come to RodMartin.org to understand it. Do your friends a favor and pass it along; and remember, there’s a lot more we publish each week that doesn’t make the newsletter.

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